Gore-ing America, Part I

The Style Section Saturday's Washington Post devoted the equivalent of nearly an entire page of increasingly expensive newsprint to an ephemeral, revisionist history book entitled: "Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America." Author Karenna Schiff observes that one of the reasons she wrote the book was:

...because ever since she was a little girl, she has wished there were "more female faces in the historical pantheon." She remembers sitting at her desk at Arlington's Oakridge Elementary School, looking at the chart of the presidents on the wall and wondering why they were all male.

But the main reason, it appears, was a lingering bitterness over the results of the Y2K election:

The smart, personable 32-year-old daughter of the Man Who Was Almost President tells us she wrote it as a kind of therapy, an antidote to the "punched-in-the-gut" feeling she got whenever she looked at the newspaper after the 2000 election.

Yep, you guessed it. Ms. Schiff is Karenna Gore Schiff, daughter of a man who in retrospect was clearly unfit to be president. (See our next story, above.) Look, we're realists. By all appearances, the Gore family appears to be quite close-knit, and, in this amoral age, that's a good thing, for sure. So we're not going to diss a daughter for supporting her dad. No way.

But what we are going to diss is the absolutely huge amount of ink and pix devoted to shilling for yet another revisionist history of obscure people (in this case, women), who are being deified simply because someone with no professional standing things that history should be rectified.

We have recalled elsewhere (and can't find the link) that our late daughter once hauled home a high-school econ/business textbook that highlighted "American leaders" in business over the past century or so. The only recognizable figure was, as we recall, Henry Ford, or perhaps, Thomas Alva Edison. The rest were women and minorities that no one had ever heard of.

Now, we're never ones to claim that sometimes people get left out of the texts of history for the wrong reasons, sometimes due to the tenor of the times. We often rail, in a literary context, over the diminution, for various reasons, of major literary figures close to our own time, like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Edna St. Vincent Millay, James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos, John O'Hara, John P. Marquand, Countee Cullen, and James Gould Cozzens to name a few. (Most of these, accidentally or otherwise, fell afoul of leftist taboos in some way, shape, or form.) But on the other hand, we don't haphazardly put people back into canons, or buy them new seats unless there's a compelling reason. In the case of feminist-oriented writing, that reasons seems to be, well, there needs to be a quota, and it needs to be retroactive.

This is utter silliness, and it's why history and literary textbooks, among others, are increasingly wrong and wrong-headed, giving rising generations of students absolutely no context at all. Readers of our daughter's textbook, for example, would have remained clueless about John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Cyrus McCormack, and other giants who transformed America's economy. Of course, since they were motivated at least partially out of greed and are all dead white guys, we now have to revise history either to minimize their presence and influence, or write them out entirely. What balderdash. This is dishonesty of the first order.

But back to Ms. Gore. We have often preached in this space that the media is devoted to pushing a Gramscian agenda that involves displacing American culture and traditions with one more to its own liking, in such a manner as to entirely displace America's true background and values. In flogging Ms. Gore's book, which elevates in status obscure women whose accomplishments, while at times significant, do not border on the profound, the Post is accomplishing two aims: First, it is adding to revisionist history by promoting a book written neither by an historian nor an expert, nor an economist who can evaluate the significance of the subjects' achievements; and two, promoting the career of a political daughter of the left who hasn't had much traction or visibility since the family plans didn't work out in 2000.

We wonder, if the writer were a Republican daughter, if the Post would have shown nearly as much solicitude, or have devoted nearly as many column inches to this nonstory.

An increasing problem in the writerly world is the enormous amount of publicity and money invested in promoting books by "famous personalities"—books that otherwise don't have anything to recommend them. The sheer amount of promotion generally guarantees that the books will at least break even, and thus provide more opportunities for the non-professional author to sin again.

Meanwhile, countless worthy books, particularly literary ones, go uncared for, unnoticed, and unpublicized. This, in turn, causes publishers to be far less interested in them because such titles "won't make money." We wonder, however, if, say, a poetry book got this type of publicity, whether, even in the current "I don't care about poetry" climate, whether it might not actually make more money than Ms. Schiff's book, given that the royalty advance, if one were given at all, would probably not approach hers.

The publishing industry has much to answer for. By using its allies on the left, like the Washington Post, and by expending shrinking publicity dollars on favored darlings of the left, they are, in the main, destroying the market for serious history, literature, and "think books" and replacing them with a cult of mostly lefty personality titles that will further the dumbing down of an increasingly revisionist America that doesn't much like itself or its past.

Don't blame me. I get this from the Post.